THINQon : "Fitful, rudderless self-doubt"

The Living Room Me and society "Fitful, rudderless self-doubt"

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Margaret Wells

"Fitful, rudderless self-doubt"

Latest Post: February 2009

13 followers

Carolyn Heilbrun, in her wonderful book “Writing a Woman’s Life,” quotes a beautiful sentence of Auerbach writing on Eliot:
“Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman”.

I am interested in whether this description resonates with others: whether one finds, as (or in the lives of) accomplished people outside conventional narrative frameworks, a sudden realization later in life that what had been perceived as certain abysmal failures in early life could, in fact, be understood as some kind of push by the subconscious to clear the way for the possibility of creative work.

(e.g. contemporary versions of things like having affairs before marriage and thus being stigmatized, which were terrible experiences going through them but which had the ultimate result of freeing the person in question from traditional marriage narratives and setting the stage for a very productive and enjoyable writing life.)

Books Discussed

Writing a Woman's Life
by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Solveig Wright	in "Being true to yourself after living a lie"	(The Living Room)
Margaret Wells	in "Can one choose to become a genius? / Can one choose to become a genius?"	(The Living Room)
Margaret Wells	in "Conquering your fears / Is it important to face our fear?"	(The Living Room)
Margaret Wells	in "How do I become dedicated? / How do I become dedicated?"	(The Living Room)
Mark Opal	in "How do I become more confident?"	(The Living Room)
Solveig Wright	in "How do you know if you're in a rebound relationship / How do you know if you're in a rebound relationship"	(Bedroom)
Catherine Bernard	in "How to be happy / How to be happy"	(The Living Room)
Margaret Wells	in "Romantic Betrayal:Should the offender confess?"	(Bedroom)
Margaret Wells	in "The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty"	(Study)

Reply to:

Molly Bloom

January 2009

37 followers

I imagine that this is very common in the lives of creative people -- there is a certain amount of real difficulty involved in becoming aware of one's talents and how they might be used, and the constant possibility or presence of failure -- though this struggle is a very subtle point to recover when looking back from beyond the "alchemical moment." For instance, it was almost certainly the case for Gertrude Stein, though not exactly the way she tells it. "The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas," written when she was 58, has a kind of authority that few people are ever able to achieve, and certainly not at thirty: the sense of life as a work of art.

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Emily Andrews

in "Is religious conversion possible?"

(The Living Room)

Reply to: or

Catherine Bernard

February 2009

7 followers

Well, I think it is always a complicated matter to expect people to tell you what you might actually want to know about their lives. I think of Simone de Beauvoir, for instance (a very different character from Gertrude Stein). But even leaving other things aside, people have a very short memory for pain. If they feel it too intensely they might remember it physically as trauma, it certainly may remain part of their lives, but it's not necessarily that they would be able to access it so readily when they think leisurely back and prepare to tell a story. Emerson says that great people have the shortest biographies -- they grind all their experiences into paint.

I always appreciated the spot in London in the National Gallery with the two self-portraits of Rembrandt facing each other across the room, 30 years apart...

In any case, I liked the quotation you cited very much. I suspect that also in the lives of certain gifted people I know, something like this is true. Not out of wedlock pregnancies, but perhaps other relationship issues: provoking break-ups through uncharacteristic behavior which they were upset with themselves about for years, or becoming attached to forceful personalities who would demand from them a certain devotion to work which they otherwise couldn't bring themselves to do, not to mention dating unsuitable people... Or even just longstanding frustration with certain aspects of self (intense sensitivity, inability to act "correctly" in certain ways) until it was understood how these might also be gifts.